Gentians for Carole - a poem from A Whistling of Birds

My collection A Whistling of Birds contains poems that speak of and to forerunners, ancestors, ghosts; of poets, musicians, artists, writers, family, friends. I feel the presence and inspiration of many beloved teachers, editors and mentors in the flow of my writing over the years, and it’s an awareness of gratitude and connection that seems more alive and electric as time passes.

This weekend, late September turning to October, Michaelmastide, my dear friend and mentor Carole Blake has been much on my mind, as she so often is, especially in my publishing life. I started working with her in late September 28 years ago, in the run-up to my first Frankfurt Book Fair, and we shared countless conversations about books and authors, also beyond the agency, over the 21 years we worked together. One memorable thread was around D.H. Lawrence and I treasure the Penguin paperback collection of Lawrence’s novels, essays and travel writing — Carole’s copies — which her sister Rosie so generously gave to me after her death.

Among the collection is the doorstopper Penguin edition of the Complete Poems (collected and edited with an introduction and notes by Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts). I love that it is still festooned with orange sticky notes (very on-brand), added by Carole’s hand when she first loaned the volume to me: the markers to point out the poems about his censored paintings, a topic we’d got onto during some late-night post-party conversation. Carole admired Lawrence’s creative vigour and daring and she loved sharing her passions with others — whether that be shoes, jewellery, wine, food, music or books, books, books.

I’d returned the borrowed book to Carole in the months before her sudden death, but in her absence I am happy to have its sturdy presence back, with her colourful markers still in situ, on my study shelf. Though in the middle of a Zoom poetry session for the D.H. Lawrence Society earlier this year, the well-thumbed copy tumbled off my lap — and split cleanly down the middle. Each part still complete in itself though, a newly-cleaved two-volume edition. I smile to think of telling Carole about that.

‘Gentians for Carole’, which references Lawrence’s ‘Bavarian Gentians’, is in Carole’s memory, a Michaelmas poem, thinking of her 29 September birthday. Lawrence too born in September, and both sharing a love of bright colour, seeking intensely-lived life.

This poem first appeared in The Hudson Review, Spring 2020, and is now included in A Whistling of Birds. I post this also with thanks to Paula Deitz, editor of The Hudson Review.

Gentians for Carole

Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.

—D. H. Lawrence, Bavarian Gentians

Slow, sad September, soft, and yes, still sad.

 

Not every house has autumn flowers,

and I have never seen a gentian with my living eyes.

Did you?—like Lawrence, dizzied by the blue

and spinning in his words?

 

The blue, repeating blues, the smoking dark;

the burning blue of Dis he muses on so long,

his darkened-on-blueness blue.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!

 

Light-seeker, Sun-searcher, sluicing off

the carbon black: south, east, west,

whichever place the compass gifts him heat.

 

No wonder he reached for gentians then,

roots plumbing shades that echo Pluto-deep

but offering fields of late-year light.

 

I hear the wind up on high meadows,

rippling through grass, the mountain lungs

wide-studded with a swooning blue.

 

Blue balm to the eyes

and on the tongue,

the healing bitter of gentian root.

 

We have been together in those dark halls,

absorbing our Autumn news

in frosted September’s chill.

Each one of us, some time, Persephone,

 

but grateful for colour, light

and meadow flowers

late into bittersweet Fall.

 

In Nottingham, barefoot, he’s always holding one.

Your ashes found the soil around Spring crocuses.

 

Give us such torch-flowers to see us through the days—

the hot-white blur and daze of racing life,

the softly rising mist of violet hours.

i.m. Carole Rae Blake
29 September 1946–25 October 2016

 

From A Whistling of Birds by Isobel Dixon (UK: Nine Arches, June 2023; South Africa: Human & Rousseau, September 2023). Both editions have a cover image and some illustrations by Scottish nature artist, Douglas Robertson. This poem first appeared in The Hudson Review, Spring 2020, ‘The British Issue’.

Lines from ‘Bavarian Gentians’ by D. H. Lawrence in ‘Gentians for Carole’ are from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence: The Poems edited by Christopher Pollnitz, © Cambridge University Press 2013. Reproduced by permission of Paper Lion Ltd, The Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli and Cambridge University Press.

Three New Poems on Anthropocene

I'm thrilled to have had three new poems published by Anthropocene.

‘Threshold’, ‘Hawkweed Burning’ and ‘Our Doubtful Art’ are all poems linked to my A Whistling of Birds project, with some echoes here from Elizabeth Bishop, Glenn Gould, John Berryman, & D.H. Lawrence (by way of the Etruscans, and with memories of a beautiful walking holiday in Tuscany).

You can read the poems here.

Walking to Orvieto. Photo by Isobel Dixon, 2015.

Walking to Orvieto. Photo by Isobel Dixon, 2015.

Evening Run - Wind, Rain & a Memory of Ladybirds

This Saturday has skittered by so fast, another blustery aul day too, the wind only dying down by dusk. Heard a robin take the gap then, a brief, but cheery trill and thought I’d best get out for a bit too – rescue the day a bit with a run, even a short one. Not half-way round, the drizzle came to take the place of the gusts; proper soaking rain by the time I was (almost) home. Par for this season’s soggy course. But the day is (damply) better for it all the same. And it’s a proper torrent out there as I write, so my timing wasn’t actually so bad …

And though a photo isn’t possible in the dark, here are some happy ladybirds from this particular route, albeit in daylight and a few weeks back. A whole host of ladybirds busy along this stretch of hedge, making the most of the feast among the abundant ivy flowers. Autumn bounty.

October Ivy & Ladybirds, Cambridge. Photo by Isobel Dixon.

October Ivy & Ladybirds, Cambridge. Photo by Isobel Dixon.

October Ivy & Ladybird, Cambridge. Photo by Isobel Dixon

October Ivy & Ladybird, Cambridge. Photo by Isobel Dixon

D.H Lawrence: Letters and a Life

Today, 2 March 2020, it’s 90 years since D.H. Lawrence died in Vence, France, at forty-four, of tuberculosis. Though in his letters – the last dwindling few of his short life’s glorious torrent of correspondence – he is still asserting, heartbreakingly, a lesser cause.

To his agent, Laurence Pollinger, he writes, on 20th February 1930 from the Ad Astra sanatorium: ‘I’ve been rather worse here – think I have a bit of ‘flu – pain too.’ To Maria Huxley, also from Ad Astra, on some following Friday, not long after: ‘Seems to me like the grippe, but they say not.’ No, not the ‘flu.

The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Heinemann, 1932.

The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Heinemann, 1932.

Reading these painful, pain-filled entries at the end of my old phoenix-embossed Heinemann hardback edition of The Letters of D.H Lawrence, I was reminded how I first read my way towards that death, the extinguishing of a fierce, creative flame. Racing through extraordinary episodes of a complex life in John Worthen’s D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider. Freezing post-Christmas days leading up to New Year in Ragusa, Sicily, reading from apartment to coffee bar to aperitivi and back again, knowing – as you do when the diminishing pages warn you – that I was about to reach The End of a Life. And I was amazed to be so utterly devastated at the details of the death I knew was coming all along. You know the dates, but the evocation of a life in a good biography makes the loss freshly shocking.

Every year at Blake Friedmann, as we head off to our agency Christmas lunch, we post a list of our Top Three Picks of the Year: three special things colleagues have read or watched or heard or seen in the past year (excluding our own clients’ work). Things that have struck us and we believe will stay with us. As, six years later, The Life of an Outsider has. I checked back to 2014 and found my description of that experience, remembering how I sat on the bed in the apartment and sobbed, so that Jan thought something newly terrible had happened.

Dipping into the Letters and the well-thumbed pages of the sepia-toned Penguin paperback biography set me off again tonight. It was always going to be a turbulent journey, with Lawrence and all his ranting and tramping (as Geoff Dyer puts it) around the world.

I’m copying in my notes from 2014 below, with thanks to my fellow traveller, artist Douglas Robertson, for giving me the biography years ago, an early seed in a fruitful collaboration. And with acknowledgement to the other inspiring writers in that post, most no longer with us. Avanti.

 

Isobel’s Top ‘Keepers’ of 2014 (from the Blake Friedmann website)

[Three, only three, Ed.? Really? Oh, okay, here goes…

D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider by John Worthen (Penguin, 2006)

D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider by John Worthen (Penguin, 2006)

My first non-agency Book of the Year, literally, was John Worthen’s absorbing biography of D.H. Lawrence (Penguin). The paperback was a gift to me from artist Douglas Robertson, when we launched into our poetry-art collaboration based around Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers. I finished it on New Year’s Day in Sicily – not in Taormina where Lawrence lived, but in Ragusa, which still felt appropriately close to the tracks of this fierce, complex poet-novelist who wrote and travelled so much. I knew of course that he died tragically young at forty-four and as I read I could see how few pages of the book were left (pages, real pages, not just 70% complete etc…!), so I was surprised to be so overwhelmingly moved when the moment of his death came. Worthen brought the contradictions, the rage, the passion and the ambition so vividly to life, and though Lawrence was by no means always a likeable man, I wept bitterly at the book’s close.

I loved the verve and originality of Glyn Maxwell’s On Poetry (Oberon), a book on the reading and writing of poetry like no other I have read. I know I will keep returning to it with relish.

Michael Donaghy was a brilliant poet and performer and an inspiring teacher whose evening class gave me my first sense of a poetry ‘home’ in London. He died ten years ago this September and his absence is still keenly felt by so many. His Collected Poems (Picador), with its Introduction by Sean O’Brien will introduce many new readers to his fine poems – I have been reading them with a bittersweet mixture of admiration, sadness, re-discovery and consolation.

And right now I am delighting in the much-anticipated Bedouin of the London Evening (Bloodaxe) by the late, enigmatic Rosemary Tonks and Clive James’s lively Poetry Notebook (Picador) … [What? That’s it, Ed? Too much already? And I was just getting started…. What about the films, the plays, the music, the novels… ? Ah. Another time.]

But [as Ed. looks the other way, absorbed in guessing who his Secret Santa is from] I have to put in a swift late mention of Shirley Jackson’s brilliant, darkly Gothic novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I know I’m a latecomer to her genius and can’t wait to read more (and know I will re-read this too – what a great character Merricat is, one of my line-up of deliciously unreliable narrators).

For more on my D.H Lawrence Birds, Beasts and Flowers project with Doug Robertson, see here.

Karoo Rain

This weekend I’ve spent some very happy time on WhatsApp with my sisters in South Africa, relishing the rain. There, in the Great Karoo, not here in Cambridge in the much soggier Fens. Yesterday outside my study window it was clear blue sky and sunshine all day, not even that chilly for February. Today has begun grey and blustery and ‘Strong Winds and Heavy Rain Showers’ are predicted pretty much all day as Storm Ciara arrives on these shores. I ain’t going nowhere. But my heart’s in the Eastern Cape anyway right now, in my heartland of the Karoo.

It’s hard to describe to those who grew up in places of abundant water what it’s like to live through long dry spells, or deep, persistent drought. Places where every conversation is not just about the weather but specifically about the rain, or lack of it. A call and response of questions – ‘Have you had rain? We had a little last night’ – with the answers coming back in precise measurements – ‘Yes, but only a couple of millimetres’ – and geographies – ‘Ag nee, there was rain over by Compassberg, but nothing at all here by us.’ Litanies you learn from childhood, as I would listen to my mother talking to people she met in the local Checkers supermarket, or hear her chatting to her brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles, on the phone. Among the news of what local character had died, who had gone in for what operation, were always, always, reports of rain.

 
Photo: Isobel Dixon

Photo: Isobel Dixon

 

Or drought. My home town Graaff-Reinet has been held in that dry clenched fist for five years. Heartbreaking over these last years to see the impact of those relentlessly cloudless skies, the local Nqweba Dam empty, the water table falling, the town’s borehole supply struggling, and locals suffering – especially the poorest communities mostly situated higher along the slopes of the ringed mountains, outside of the horseshoe shape of the Sundays River which encircles the central part of town. That horseshoe long a dry riverbed, filled only with thorn trees, reeds and rocks.

We’re used it being dry in the Karoo, but this has been a particularly long, harsh drought, desperate for the farmers on whom so much of the regional economy depends, and difficult for the growing tourism business as well. The very real lack of rainfall has been exacerbated by failing pumping and purification infrastructure, aged and sometimes vandalised equipment, mismanagement of the water supply, and poor education and preparation for a water shortage crisis. And the poorest in the community always the hardest hit, often no water at all in their taps, trucks supplying bottled water coming too seldom to meet everyone’s need. NGO Gift of the Givers deployed to help with the supply, but deep infrastructural and inequality issues are at play here, not just the lack of rain.

 
Photo: Isobel Dixon

Photo: Isobel Dixon

 

In late October last year, local helpers scoured the parched surface of the dam to pick up the thousands of dead fish rotting on its surface – clearing up an estimated 36,000 fish. In November I walked the top of the dam wall and took photos of aching stretches of desiccated clay and silt. “Rain!” was scratched into one of the wooden posts of the Camdeboo National Park sign above the dam. The exclamatory word heavily, doubly underscored, followed by “It is coming soon”, signed by the eventually prophetic Elijah on 20 March 2019. Months later, every conversation in town was still about the drought, the hope for rain, and debates around water management. Could the silt could be dredged now, with the dam so dry? Is the dam wall, almost a century old, still strong enough if floods come after the eventual hoped-for rains? I remember when the dam overflowed in the floods of 1974, as it has a couple of times since. And many questions remain, with local people trying to work with local government to improve matters.

 
Photo: Isobel Dixon

Photo: Isobel Dixon

 

But at least there is now rain, a silver thread on our family chat timeline. A story of longed-for rainfall, starting with a WhatsApped video from Laura of rain falling on the paving slabs of Brighton Keep B&B’s back garden on 30 December, and lovely pictures of locals walking home from work, splashing barefoot through puddles, shoes in hand. Hoping that the day’s shower wouldn’t just be an isolated occurrence. Thankfully, it wasn’t, and rain has fallen every week this year since. And I have the images on my phone to prove it, of course. The conversations about the number of millimetres, which towns and farms have had rain or not are exactly the same, just in a different medium and over greater distances. 

I’ve named 2020 The Year of the Tortoise (sorry, Rat), not just because I love D.H. Lawrence’s poems about tortoises in his Birds, Beasts and Flowers collection (and still have my own tortoise poems to write for my collaborative project linked to Lawrence’s book), but also because of local Graaff-Reinetter Nicola Belden’s glorious photograph of a venerable old Karoo mountain tortoise drinking from a roadside puddle at New Year. A photo that happily made it into the local newspaper, the Graaff-Reinet Advertiser’s ‘Pic of the Week’. An ancient local resident slaking his considerable thirst with fresh-fallen water, beside the empty Nqweba Dam.

Today there is water in the dam again. After repeated rain in the catchment area, water flowed down the foothills of the Sneeuberg range and along the rivers that feed the Nqweba Dam: the Sundays, Gats, Pienaars, and Broederstroom, also known as the Erasmuskloof. (While you may not need to know the names, I love to say them. River mantras.) And locals don’t just talk about rain, they photograph and film it – blissful to hear the shushing or drumming of rain in one of my sisters’ videos – and townspeople were out again this weekend, filming water.

I watched Mary Lou and Laura’s shared videos and photos – town and farm, Graaff-Reinet and Nieu Bethesda – and wanted to cry with happiness. Beautiful brown water flowing in rivers under bridges, sluicing across farm yards. A misty silver-grey line of water creeping across the dam floor. Beautiful, hopeful, water.

So I miss my sisters and also my late mother and father, thinking of what they would be saying about the rain now. How my father would be giving thanks for the answer to prayer in his Sunday morning service and my mother saying proudly, over tea and scones, how full our rain tanks are. As I write, the wind ups its bluster around my northern house and I miss the sight and the sound of southern rain, Karoo rain, and its blessed scent. ‘Petrichor’ is a fine word for that scent of rain after a dry time – a word that keeps popping up on social media these days, perhaps a little worn with use. But the experience itself is always fresh and extraordinary, that smell of rain on a hot and dusty street. For me it’s always the smell of the Karoo, rare but precious.

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that rain, water (and the lack of it) runs through so many of my poems. Here are two early ones, ‘Plenty’ from A Fold in the Map (published in South Africa by Jacana and in the UK by Nine Arches Press) and ‘Dry Run’ from my very first collection Weather Eye, published by Carapace (for which I will always be grateful to Gus Ferguson). Now out of print, some of the poems from Weather Eye, like ‘Plenty’ though not ‘Dry Run’ are included in two of my subsequent collections, A Fold in the Map and The Tempest Prognosticator. Lots of weather, all over the map.

Plenty

When I was young and there were five of us,
all running riot to my mother’s quiet despair,
our old enamel tub, age-stained and pocked
upon its griffin claws, was never full.

Such plenty was too dear in our expanse of drought
where dams leaked dry and windmills stalled.
Like Mommy’s smile. Her lips stretched back
and anchored down, in anger at some fault –

of mine, I thought – not knowing then
it was a clasp to keep us all from chaos.
She saw it always, snapping locks and straps,
the spilling: sums and worries, shopping lists

for aspirin, porridge, petrol, bread.
Even the toilet paper counted,
and each month was weeks too long.
Her mouth a lid clamped hard on this.

We thought her mean. Skipped chores,
swiped biscuits – best of all
when she was out of earshot
stole another precious inch

up to our chests, such lovely sin,
lolling luxuriant in secret warmth
disgorged from fat brass taps,
our old compliant co-conspirators.

Now bubbles lap my chin. I am a sybarite.
The shower’s a hot cascade
and water’s plentiful, to excess, almost, here.
I leave the heating on.

And miss my scattered sisters,
all those bathroom squabbles and, at last,
my mother’s smile, loosed from the bonds
of lean, dry times and our long childhood.

Dry Run

Driving through thunder and into the blue,
my sunglasses bruise this widest of skies
that presses its heaviness onto the plain,
a far scabby stretch of resolute scrub.
Horizons are jointed: an elbow, a hip,
to my left lies a jawbone with half of its teeth
and, I see from the signs, an appropriate name.
I drive on past Hopewell, past Wheatlands
(without any wheat), past crows’ nests, black burrs
spiked on telephone poles. I don’t meet a car
on my way to the coast and my flight –
after miles of fencing, a cluster of sheep.
My forehead’s bound tight by a bandage of heat
and even with shades I must screw up my eyes.
At least there’s a breath, the windmills are spinning,
but bridges stand fast, spanning nothing but sand,
while ahead the tar shimmers its miracle stream.

But the landscape that draws my gaze most
is the slice that is held in the glass facing back.
I lift my eyes often to capture the image:
the softest chiffon, misty veils dropping down.
The sweetness of dark after blistering days,
a study of mountains and buildings in grey:
the blessing of rain falling on my home town.


Should you be interested to learn more about Graaff-Reinet and nearby Nieu Bethesda (both beautiful places), see here:

Welcome to Graaff-Reinet and Nieu Bethesda Tourism Information

And here are a couple of local charities who do vital work in Graaff-Reinet:

Vuyani Safe Haven and Camdeboo Hospice

My Mother, Knitting

This week has been Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK. Last Sunday was Mother’s Day in South Africa. And today – 19.5.19 – would have been my mother’s 89th birthday. She died four years ago, on 16 May 2015, and I think of her – my mother, Ann Rosemary Murton Chinn, Ann Dixon, Mommy, Mrs D. – every day. But especially so in these last days, with this cluster of calendar connections. Thinking of her vigour and vivacity, her love of reading and conversation and company, but also of how she could veer from energy to exhaustion so completely, and how she struggled against anxiety and depression for so long, struck too by serious post-natal depression after my birth, the fourth of five daughters.

Ann Rosemary Murton Dixon Black & White

I haven’t seen Louis Theroux’s BBC documentary Mothers on the Edge yet, but will. It felt to us as though my mother was on that edge – and sometimes over it – for most of our childhood, and I wish she could have received better help than was available then. My sisters and I grew up at a time when there was so much shame and secrecy attached to mental illness. Shame and secrecy attached to so many things. And of course, in spite of some very dark moments, she would have received better care than so many in South Africa.
Much more to say about all this, for another day, but here are two poems from The Leonids, a short collection about her which Mariscat published in 2016. ‘Louder than Words’ speaks about one of the hardest times when I was still in junior school, and ‘You Must Make Things Last Forever’ was written later, from the viewpoint of a daughter returning regularly from London to our family home in the Karoo.

Though published after she died, my mother knew I was working on the pamphlet, had read some of the poems, and had given the project her blessing. She liked that Mariscat was based in my father’s beloved Edinburgh, but was also quietly pleased that the publisher Hamish Whyte had actually asked for more poems about her, having read ‘Louder than Words’ and a few more. Fierce, and frank – sometimes too frank, some might think – she believed in ‘calling a spade a spade’ and always spoke openly about her depression. Though she didn’t look for or expect sympathy, she wanted people to know.

She would have said that final word with adamant italic emphasis too. Perhaps underlined as well, for good measure.

These, and more, are for her.


Louder than Words

A woman knitting
in a mental hospital:
plain and purl
in job-lot wool.

She struggles
with the tricky ribbing,
collar, button, cuff.
Her needles click –

cast on, cast off.
My mother
and her effortful
vocabulary of love.


You Must Make Things Last Forever

My mother’s urge: preserve, preserve.
I have been its beneficiary for so long now,
heritage and burden, so much stuff.
Be frugal, save, find a use for everything –  

empty jam jars, lids, the usual screws, nails, string,
the junk shop finds, triumphant auction wins.
Frames without pictures, pictures without frames,
random job lots, things to fix. Some day

this could come in handy. One day we’ll work out
what this is. Waste not, want not,
lest you too be judged for sinful waste.
Habits of a lifetime, every thing in its place,  

but every week new places must be found
for things. A tide of things for tidying.
My mother – keeper, sorter, out of sorts
when just one mug is missing

from the cup-hook line-up’s motley patterning.
I’d smash the lot, but fear her furious distress.
Those worthless mugs are full of meaning,
there’s logic to their order; every stick of furniture

comes with a story, she can cite the date, the price. 
But it’s the history – the Family Bibles, photographs
of tombstones, priceless hand-me-downs –
she loves the best. A shift of antique lace,

worn for my Confirmation; for a dance at school
Granny’s jet-black sequinned flapper dress.
For economy, pre-vintage cool, but glorious.
If I tried them on today, they’d fall to dust.

And there’s my mother, slowly shrinking,
with her surfaces’ transparency, letter-paper
onionskin, like the pages in the box
she keeps the precious memorabilia in.

Love notes from Harwood, aerogrammes,
that heirloom letter from New York.
She shows it to me every time I’m home,
an archivists’ conspiracy. Yes, I’ll keep it safe,

hoarder’s honour, squirrel’s nod. Hard nuts
to crack, collectors. So much keeping
in keeping on. And perhaps things should be left
to rust, be lost. I should be practising 

the opposite of clench, opening my fingers,
no desperate holding on, not any more. 
Less, less, they say, is more.

Don’t mourn the missing cup.
No totting up the loss. All things considered,
at the end of the day, we will be more or less okay.

First published in The Leonids (Mariscat, 2016)


Two Dizzying, Sizzling July Events - Vertiginous, Friday 13 July, & The Sizzling Shuffle, Saturday 28 July 2018

‘This is a strange mood love story,
about Madeleine and Judy,
painted ladies, murder, and a fall
or three…’

            From Vertiginous, premiering at the BFI Southbank, London, Friday 13 July 2018

You don’t have to have seen Hitchcock’s Vertigo to come and see six poets responding to Hitchcock’s powerful, haunting film. In fact, in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the iconic film’s release, the British Film Institute are not only hosting the premiere of our show Vertiginous on Friday 13 July, there’s also a special ticket offer to see the poetry performance, and catch the film afterwards.

Or you can just come see the show between 7 and 8 p.m., then hang out with the poets in the BFI bar till late… It would be lovely to see you!
 

Vertiginous Title by Simon Barraclough.jpg

 

Vertiginous was devised by Simon Barraclough and the show features original Vertigo-inspired work by Mona Arshi, Dzifa Benson, Chris McCabe, Chrissy Williams, Simon Barraclough and myself, all in live performance with accompanying visuals and music. The original music was composed by Oli Barrett and Simon Barraclough.

And if you can’t make that, there’s ‘The Sizzling Shuffle’ on Saturday 28 July at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden, part of the regular Shuffle series. This night is hosted by Chris Beckett and Lynne Hjelmgaard, and I’m delighted to be reading alongside Chrissy Williams for the second time this month, along with Mark Waldron, Anne Berkeley, Declan Ryan, Selina Rodriguez and Adil Hussain.

I’m also over the moon that Nine Arches, UK publisher of my most recent collection Bearings, will be re-issuing my two earlier collections A Fold in the Map and The Tempest Prognosticator – very soon. Just as soon as I get those proofs back to them… ! [On it this weekend, honest, Ed. … !]  News will be updated on the Nine Arches website in due course.

 

EVENT DETAILS

Vertiginous, Friday 13 July at the BFI Southbank:

To mark the 60th anniversary of Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock’s intense and disturbing masterpiece of obsession, manipulation and loss, 6 cinephile poets reinterpret the film in performance, with original music, and images.

Vertiginous was devised by Simon Barraclough and the show features Mona Arshi, Dzifa Benson, Isobel Dixon, Chris McCabe, Chrissy Williams and Simon Barraclough in live performance with visuals and music.
Original music by Oli Barrett and Simon Barraclough.

Friday 13 July, 19:00-20:00
BFI Southbank, Belvedere Road, South Bank, London SE1 8XT
Blue Room, Upstairs from Ticket Office
How to get to the BFI Southbank.

Tickets available from the BFI Box Office or online here.
£8 for the Vertiginous show alone, or you can buy a joint ticket with the later screening of Vertigo on Fri 13 July (Film starts 20:30 in NFT1 £15, Concessions £12; BFI Members pay £2 less)

With the kind support of the BFI and The Poetry Society and ably assisted by John Canfield.

The Sizzling Shuffle, Saturday 28 July, The Poetry Cafe

Come along to a summer night of poetry in the Shuffle series – hosted by Chris Beckett and Lynne Hjelmgaard, with Isobel Dixon, Chrissy Williams, Mark Waldron and Anne Berkeley, Declan Ryan, Selina Rodriguez and Adil Hussain.

Saturday 29 July, 7:30 pm – 10:00 pm

The Poetry Café
22 Betterton Street
London WC2H 9BX

Ladybird Pastorale (or, Ludwig & the Ladybug)

Lady-beetle Close-Up by Thomas Moertel, from Wikimedia Commons

Lady-beetle Close-Up by Thomas Moertel, from Wikimedia Commons

I was up with the birds and the June dawn last Saturday, and weary when I laced up my running shoes and stepped out of the door in the afternoon – but sometimes nothing clears the fuzzy deskbound head as well as a run, even a slow twenty-minute one. And I had my iPod for company – a spot of Beethoven to urge me on.

By the time I pushed open the gate to Nightingale Park Creatures of Prometheus had given way to Coriolan, and slowly, overture to overture, I was warming up and finding my stride – though still, as always, molto molto moderato. Past the recently planted apple trees and on to Egmont, my favourite of the trio of overtures on this recording. By then my mind had loosened up a little too. How happily we ran, I was thinking, me and Egmont and old Ludwig Van. (Yes, too loose, I know, but I can’t help it, it’s the rhythm of the run….).  Me and Otto Klemperer, and the Philharmonia…A steady sostenuto suits a slow runner like me.

On, along Queen Edith’s Way, and my earphones blossomed into the glories of the Sixth Symphony, note upon unfurling, heart-lifting note. Allegro ma non troppo and doing just fine. Even though I knew it was coming, the opening bars are always a fresh and cheering wonder. Except for the first years after my father’s death, when I couldn’t listen to the music he loved without searing heartache – so I didn’t listen to much at all, especially not Baroque or Classical composers. I only realised later how firmly and for how long I had steered clear of Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Handel, my father’s beloved Sibelius, and especially Beethoven and the stirring Sixth.

Like Ludwig van Beethoven, Charles Harwood Dixon loved a long, thoughtful country walk, and he loved the Pastorale in particular. When I read later that Beethoven had annotated the first movement ‘Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside’[1], it fitted my ever-cheery father perfectly. The words evoked an image of him stepping down from the train to some country platform, lifting his hat to other passengers in farewell, and setting off down a leafy lane, map and prayer book tucked into his long-trousered safari suit pocket.

In the last weeks before he died, when his legs no longer took him anywhere, my mother moved a record player to the foot of their bed so he could listen to our collection of old LPs. I remember phoning one day from London and hearing the Sixth Symphony in the background. ‘It’s good of you to call,’ he said, ‘we’ve been having a lovely time here, running through the woods and fields all day.’ At first I thought it was just the wandering of his mind as he struggled for breath, not enough oxygen to his brain despite the canister beside his bed, but much later I remembered what had inspired the Sixth, why it was called the Pastorale. A flowing musically illustrative journey through the beauties of the countryside, babbling brooks and cuckoo calls – so perhaps he had just been making a joke, sweet and playful and more than a little sad. Either way, the music brought him imaginative release, and took him on a journey his own body could no longer make

These days, grateful for what I can still do, and no longer running away from the music, symphonies are my favourite running company. Only instruments, no lyrics: there are so many words (‘too many notes’?) in my publishing and poetry life, and I relish this space without them, just body and music and nature and breath. But of course in that meditative space, the words bubble up in your head, things shake free and surprise you.

Something else surprised me too on my Saturday run, jogging on, thinking of that conversation with Daddy and the way, even in extremis, he had such a calm presence, and heartening vision. Even, it seemed, an easy sense of connection with the sublime. More than just the air of being a man of the cloth – I’ve known ministers with the opposite of peace about them, the most unpastoral pastors.

I’m thinking as I run, is ‘sublime’ too big a word? Perhaps it was just his curiosity, his awareness, that quiet yet fulsome appreciation of the aesthetic and natural world. What we’d call ‘mindfulness’ now. I slow to sip some water from the bottle I’m carrying and as I look down I see that a ladybird beetle has settled on my running trousers: how long she’s been there I don’t know, but I don’t want to brush her off. So I just run on, sure she’ll take wing soon.

A block on she’s still there, snug against a seam. Somehow she doesn’t look like she’s going anywhere, except where I’m going, right now. All right, ladybird, I think, let’s test your tenacity, and mine. This was just going to be my ordinary short loop-and-back-home tick-the-box run, but perhaps I can stretch it a bit. I vow I’m not going to stop running till this little Coccinellida has gone. It surely won’t be that long, what with the breeze that rises as I reach the crossing – and instead of going left, home, I turn right, out to Fulbourn and the windmill on the hill, the run I do when I’m really fit. Which now I’m most certainly not.

Ladybird’s still with me as I cross the turn-off to the airfield. She ain’t flying anywhere, just lifting her wings now and then, a bit of a scurry and a turn, then a hunkering down. Like she’s conducting a survey, a little beetle physio, checking out the state of the ITB on my tight left thigh. She’s not helping that much though, so I pause to stretch, and even then she doesn’t take the chance to get off at the convenient stop.

Impossible not to be fond of these creatures, bright round things, both homely and ethereal. She’s one of the orange ones, on the rise here I know, not like the bright red black-spotted ones from my childhood in South Africa. I fervently believed – and well, really still do – in the good luck they bring you, how must let one trundle along your hand to your fingertip, pause and take wing, then make your wish….

I’m wondering what to wish for if Little Orange takes flight as I hit the hill – if hill it can be called, this modest wee slope in the flatlands of the Fens – and feel my muscles groan. Thinking to myself, be careful what you vow, there are stories about people like you, making careless promises to strangers met on the road, getting carried away by the little people, or creatures, to deep under the hill, under a spell, never to return till their loved ones are old, or gone…. Yes, beware the wiles of Coccinellidae, and ouch, onward (she’s still there), up the hill (which now feels more hilly), slower and slower, molto andantino now.  Phew.

I stop completely to swig some water (fine excuse), as a stream of cars, back from Saturday shopping, roll by. Not quite Beethoven’s ‘merry gathering of country folk’ from the Third Movement.[2] A young boy leans out of window and shouts: ‘Don’t give up!’ as they whizz past. Is the whole of the human and insect world in league to make me run my legs off? Huh. All right for some.

But it’s embarrassing to be in your running gear a few miles from home, in full view of the homegoing crowds, and walking, so I pick up again (scarcely faster than a walk really, so who am I kidding), and we soldier on together – Ludwig and the ladybird and I, though she’s not really doing much soldiering. Ludwig’s helping on the uplifting motivational front, but you’re not exactly pulling your weight, are you, ladybird? And what is your weight exactly?[3]

What I do know is she’s doing a little seam-to-seam scurry on my leg, a to-and-fro perambulation as if she were an orange-frocked lady of leisure impatiently pacing a train carriage ahead of her station. She clearly wants to get somewhere – but where? Not the crown of the hill, by the old windmill, where I stretch again before I turn, and not back down the slope where I pause to examine a clump of woolly thistles, flowers busy with bee browsers above the moth-eaten (or caterpillar-munched) leaves.

So I’m keeping on, eyes to the horizon, the old just-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other device, on the home stretch at last, but ladybird ain’t gone, which means I still have to run…. So instead of the straight route back down Cherry Hinton Road, I veer into the grounds of Cherry Hinton Hall – which I would have passed a whole lot sooner had I not made my rash running promise and Coleopteran detour.

There’s a sudden peace on the far side of the hedge, among the gentle towers of trees, the soil soft underfoot. I walk under a generous canopy of leaves and wish I knew more of their names, though I can spot a beautiful beech – and a sad, sick-looking chestnut, alas. But a calm green space, a place to breathe in – and as I do, deeply, I look down and realise she’s gone, taken wing at last.

Perhaps the park was where she’d wanted to get all along, all that pacing her impatience at my silly scenic route, shilly-shallying along on a hare-brained whim (but at tortoise-like speed). Perhaps she’s after an early pitch for Cambridge Folk Festival in a few weeks’ time. Ladybirds love music too… See, the endorphins do make you high, and I’m feeling elated and surprised I managed to run so far, an unexpected start to training for a half-marathon in Palermo in November.[4] The only ‘thunder and storm’ I’ve been through on this journey is through my headphones, but I have all the full-hearted gratitude of the Pastorale’s closing ‘Shepherd’s Song’ – ‘cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm’.

And here among the life-enhancing trees there’s more than a touch of the sublime. Not so hard to find after all, if you know where to look, how to listen, and what company to keep.

7 July 2017

~

Some Notes:

[1] Erwachen heiterer Empfindungen bei der Ankunft auf dem Lande’

[2] I love the relish of the original German: ‘Lustiges Zusammensein der Landleute’

[3] I was thinking that’s the kind of question my little nephew Stuart might ask and Googled for an answer when I got home – to find to my delight that there’s a book called just that: How Much Does a Ladybug Weigh? I’ve already ordered it…

[4] More on the Palermo run anon… A long way to go with the training, ladybird or no ladybird! I’ll be doing some fundraising with that run for Parkinson’s research as I did in the Havana race last year – but right now, philanthropic running fans, you can support my colleague Tom Witcomb and Jaime Frost who are running the British 10km race in London on Sunday 9 July, in support of BTBS, the Book Trade Charity. The Book Trade Charity is an excellent charity which offers support and guidance to people in the book trade and their dependents in times of need. They also provide accommodation for our agency’s Carole Blake Open Doors Project, which helps make this diversity project possible.

To sponsor BTBS, The Book Trade Charity, via Tom and Jaime’s run, click here.

 

The Jewel – A Poem for Carole

Photo of Carole Blake - with champagne & pearls, on her 70th birthday in September - by our colleague Conrad Williams.

Photo of Carole Blake - with champagne & pearls, on her 70th birthday in September - by our colleague Conrad Williams.

My beloved colleague, friend and mentor Carole Blake died suddenly last month – far too soon, but in full flow and flight, as I think she would have wanted. Like so many of her friends and colleagues, I keep expecting her to sweep into the office with a story to tell, and often hear her voice in my ear, characteristically crisp, often finished with a chuckling flourish.

Like the first line in the poem below, the words I heard in her voice as I was running one day soon after she died, which gave me the first line of the poem I wrote for her funeral. Like taking dictation from her, you might say. A thought that brings back another wave of memories – back in 1995 when I began as Carole’s assistant at Blake Friedmann, we all dictated our reams of Book Fair notes, but at least there was someone else much swifter to type them… “Jane types faster than a speeding bullet,” as Carole would say. And I have to admit my CV had exaggerated my own typing speed somewhat. Given Carole’s love of an expansive story perhaps that was something she wouldn’t have minded, as long as the job was done. It never mattered anyhow, and I think I managed to keep up, over the next two decades of hard work and laughter. A great deal of both, shared camaraderie and challenge, and joy in the authors and the stories, and a close band of colleagues.

At the funeral this Monday past, the celebrant began with the image of a multi-faceted jewel, the many sides of the person we had come to mourn and say farewell to. I had no idea those lines would be in the service, but loved the fitting serendipity: that I had chosen to call this poem ‘The Jewel’, and that many people had, like me, decided to wear purple, Carole’s favourite colour, reflecting her much-loved amethysts. My talented colleague Hattie, Carole’s assistant and an agent at Blake Friedmann, read Jenny Joseph’s ‘Warning’ before me, so poised and clear and beautiful.  ‘When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple’… And after the service several people said, ‘Did you notice the stained glass window behind you?’  (I hadn’t), ‘It was purple.’

Colour, light and love stitched together a service with several warm tributes: the eulogy written by Carole’s sister Rosie Walker (with many murmurs and laughs of recognition from the gathering), fond words from author Peter James and close friend Olga Vezeris, Hattie’s reading, and ‘Panis Angelicus’ beautifully sung by Naomi Ladenburg. You can read more in this lovingly encapsulated description by Carole's friend, journalist Liz Thomson. And so many more stories shared by many, many friends, publishers and authors (who were also Carole's dear friends) on social media, in letters and in my inbox – which I hope to be able to answer better in due course. A flood of messages, but every memory and story is precious.  There will be more to share at a memorial next year.

So this too is for Carole, with myriad memories of colourful stories, exhibitions and lunches, art and accessories, love and laughter – and the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is where I first really got to know her and appreciate what a great sharer and communicator she was. Her treatment kept her from the Buchmesse this year, and I so missed her there, and always will.

The Jewel

Never let facts get in the way of a good story
I hear you say, turn towards you to reply,
to check the detail of some famous anecdote.
But my mouth is stopped: on my tongue a stone,

a river pebble blocks my question’s flow.
I pluck it out, and look! not stone, but amethyst,
your purples swirling in its polished light.
Oh, your thrill in treasures, jewellery, any art

that’s made with colour, care and craft: a lavish coat,
that rosy punchbowl’s miniature perfection,
books of every size and sort, a painted harpsichord.
Your doll’s house was a world complete,

all yours to fashion as you wished, and though
you knew you might not finish it, the end was not
the point. The labour was all love and chattels
aren’t the legacy. Your clarity and force,

your pleasure in the great bazaar of life,
the splendour and the clamour of it all.
How in the thick of it your smooth-worn stories
brought both teller and the listeners delight.

And I recall how crossing the bridge back to our hotel,
we’d pause in Frankfurt’s golden autumn light,
and you’d reminisce how once you drove out to the hills
after the Fair. I’ll miss that pause with you. But wish you

godspeed on a crisp, bright afternoon, a drive in a car swift,
open-topped, heading into the Taunus Mountains, all aglow,
for a long, slow, laughing lunch with one you love. Here,
we’ll keep the stories burnished up. Keep relishing the day.

i.m Carole Rae Blake
29 September 1946 – 25 October 2016

 See more on Carole here.

(And I'm still looking for the right photo of Carole with amethysts ... though she did love the specially-strung ropes of (mainly) black pearls in this photo, taken by our colleague Conrad Williams on her 70th birthday in September).

6 Poets at the Fruitmarket Gallery – 7pm, Wed 17 August 2016 – Alan Gillis

Poet #6 – ALAN GILLIS

 Unfortunately, Alan Gillis is not able to take part in the reading as originally planned, but we hope you enjoy this introduction to his work and we look forward to welcoming him at another Fruitmarket poetry night.

Join Eliza Kentridge, Isobel Dixon, Clare Best, Tessa Berring and Rob A. Mackenzie at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, on Wednesday 17 August, 7pm for a prompt 7:30 reading start, to finish at 9:30 – 3 poets in each half, with a short interval for wine and book buying. The evening is free, but donations are welcome. Sign up on Eventbrite or Facebook.

The Fruitmarket Gallery is right by Waverley Station: 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1DF - View Map

The poets will read new work and from recent collections, and the night will include some original poems from the poets inspired by the work of Damián Ortega in the gallery’s current exhibition. Damián Ortega is one of the most prominent artists of the new Mexican generation and for The Fruitmarket Gallery’s summer exhibition, Ortega has made new sculptures, mostly from clay, focusing on how the forces of nature – wind, water, earth and fire – act on the earth both independently of and in relationship to humans.

Here’s an introduction to another of our six poets, Alan Gillis:

About Alan:

Alan Gillis is from Belfast, and teaches English Literature at The University of Edinburgh. His poetry collection Scapegoat (2014) followed Here Comes the Night (2010), Hawks and Doves (2007) and Somebody, Somewhere (2004), all published by The Gallery Press. He was chosen by the Poetry Book Society as a ‘Next Generation Poet’ in 2014.

Park Walk

Press your face into cobwebs on the elm's
coarse bark, away from the cars' flotilla,
the hubbub of farting buses, tinned trams.
The sky buoys your mind like a cinema.

Running fingers through rosebay in the park
you feel tremors, as distant trains crest
the lake, within the hedge's dark;
a quake of light through the dilapidated nest.

You go away and leave us,
you leave us and you go away
through the town's thrummed laburnum musk and splay,
skin crawling with the passing cars' convolvulus.

 

Read more about Alan Gillis here.

6 Poets at the Fruitmarket Gallery – 7pm, Wed 17 August 2016 – Isobel Dixon

Poet #5 – ISOBEL DIXON

Join Isobel Dixon, Alan Gillis, Eliza Kentridge, Tessa Berring, Clare Best and Rob A. Mackenzie at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, on Wednesday 17 August, 7pm for a prompt 7:30 reading start, to finish at 9:30 – 3 poets in each half, with a short interval for wine and book buying. The evening is free, but donations are welcome. Sign up on Eventbrite or Facebook.

The Fruitmarket Gallery is right by Waverley Station: 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1DF - View Map

 The poets will read new work and from recent collections, and the night will include some original poems from the poets inspired by the work of Damián Ortega in the gallery’s current exhibition. Damián Ortega is one of the most prominent artists of the new Mexican generation and for The Fruitmarket Gallery’s summer exhibition, Ortega has made new sculptures, mostly from clay, focusing on how the forces of nature – wind, water, earth and fire – act on the earth both independently of and in relationship to humans.

Here’s an introduction to another of our six poets, Isobel Dixon:

About Isobel:

Isobel Dixon’s debut Weather Eye (Carapace) won the Olive Schreiner Prize in South Africa, where she grew up. Her fourth poetry collection Bearings is published by Nine Arches in the UK and Modjaiji in South Africa. Scottish publisher Mariscat published a pamphlet, The Leonids, in August, and Nine Arches will re-issue her earlier collections, A Fold in the Map and The Tempest Prognosticator, later in 2016. With Simon Barraclough and Chris McCabe she co-wrote and performed in The Debris Field, about the sinking of RMS Titanic. She enjoys collaborations with artists and composers too and is working with Scottish artist Douglas Robertson on a project inspired by D.H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Her work is recorded for the Poetry Archive.

Ellon

What are we to do with all this sky?
Swifts swoop and stitch it
to the glistening grass,

bring flighty news of clouds
that gather     pass    disperse
as birds do,

chirruping the breeze.

Here even the breeze
has water in.
The grass is fat with juice,

the river laps your skin.

The cloudlight turns,
pale stone. The turbines
make their stately signs –

alien druid presences
absorbing winds
into their whiteness,

making fire.

The wide earth’s washed
in several silences.
The grass tufts nod.

This day
will be like another day
and not.

 

From Bearings, published by Nine Arches in the UK and Modjaji in South Africa.
‘Ellon’ first appeared in Slow Things: Poems About Slow Things, published by The Emma Press.

See more on isobeldixon.com
Twitter: @isobeldixon

And come and hear more at the Fruitmarket Gallery!

 

6 Poets at the Fruitmarket Gallery – 7pm, Wed 17 August 2016 – Tessa Berring

Poet #4 – TESSA BERRING

Join Tessa Berring, Clare Best, Isobel Dixon, Alan Gillis, Eliza Kentridge, and Rob A. Mackenzie at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, on Wednesday 17 August, 7pm for a prompt 7:30 reading start, to finish at 9:30 – 3 poets in each half, with a short interval for wine and book buying. The evening is free, but donations are welcome. Sign up on Eventbrite or Facebook.

The Fruitmarket Gallery is right by Waverley Station: 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1DF - View Map

The poets will read new work and from recent collections, and the night will include some original poems from the poets inspired by the work of Damián Ortega in the gallery’s current exhibition. Damián Ortega is one of the most prominent artists of the new Mexican generation and for The Fruitmarket Gallery’s summer exhibition, Ortega has made new sculptures, mostly from clay, focusing on how the forces of nature – wind, water, earth and fire – act on the earth both independently of and in relationship to humans.

Here’s an introduction to another of our six poets:

About Tessa:

Tessa Berring studied Cultural History at the University of Aberdeen and Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art. Much of her work, both written and visual, stems from an interest in the quality of fragments, extracts, and displaced objects, especially in relation to memory and sense perception. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals/anthologies, and her poetry sequence 'Paper, Dust, and Donkeys' is included this year in a publication with fellow Edinburgh poets Marjorie Lofti Gil and Jane Bonnyman. She regularly works in collaboration, most recently with writer and artist Kathrine Sowerby on the performance and artist's book Tables and Other Animals, A Poem in Four Acts.

Poem from the sequence ‘Paper, Dust, and Donkeys’

19.

Let's get back to the donkeys,
the used bus tickets,
little scarves,
things like that.

Or this, I found it:

Ted and rose are in the---
Ted is---
Rose fetches a---and a---
Rose is---Ted is---
Rose---

Little scarves!
I don't want to think about little scarves!
I want rough kisses,
I want dust under my feet,
I want to be triangular!

 

See more on tessaberring.tumblr.com

And come and hear more at the Fruitmarket Gallery!

6 Poets at the Fruitmarket Gallery – 7pm, Wed 17 August 2016 – Clare Best

Poet #3 – CLARE BEST

Join Clare Best, Isobel Dixon, Alan Gillis, Eliza Kentridge, Rob A. Mackenzie and Tessa Berring at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, on Wednesday 17 August, 7pm for a prompt 7:30 reading start, to finish at 9:30 – 3 poets in each half, with a short interval for wine and book buying. The evening is free, but donations are welcome. Sign up on Eventbrite or Facebook.

The Fruitmarket Gallery is right by Waverley Station: 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1DF - View Map

The poets will read new work and from recent collections, and the night will include some original poems from the poets inspired by the work of Damián Ortega in the gallery’s current exhibition. Damián Ortega is one of the most prominent artists of the new Mexican generation and for The Fruitmarket Gallery’s summer exhibition, Ortega has made new sculptures, mostly from clay, focusing on how the forces of nature – wind, water, earth and fire – act on the earth both independently of and in relationship to humans.

Here’s an introduction to another of our six poets, Clare Best:

About Clare:

Clare Best’s first full collection, Excisions, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, 2012. Other poetry publications include Treasure Ground (HappenStance 2010), Breastless (Pighog 2011) and CELL (Frogmore Press 2015). Clare’s prose memoir was runner-up in the Mslexia Memoir Competition 2015. Springlines, her collaborative project with the painter Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis, explores hidden and mysterious bodies of water across the South of England – work from this project was shown at Glyndebourne in summer 2015 and there will be further exhibitions across Kent, Sussex and Hampshire over the next two years. Clare has been a bookbinder, a bookseller and an editor. She is currently an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing for the Open University, and in 2015 was one of two Writers in Residence at the University of Brighton.

 

The Aftermath Inspector                                                              

The boy wakes to the red call in the green night.
Unmoving on his narrow bed, he hears
his father run downstairs to fix quick tea, and then

his steady dressing – overalls, gauntlets, waders –
according to what kind of aftermath it is.
Hours until he’s back, hours the boy wonders

how many yards of buckled track, how many carriages.
He imagines arclights, inspectors gathering screws
and bolts, identifying scattered parts.

Later, his father props the waders in the shed
and sits. Resting, he says. The boy stays close,
waits for him to search his bag. A trophy from the site.

Over the years he’s brought three merlin feathers,
the cracked skull of a hare, one perfect ammonite,
a roe buck’s antler (velvet still attached)

and now this grey stick with the sway of a swan’s neck.
The boy watches his father place the keepsake
on the store-room shelf, he sees him

climb the stairs to wash, and dress
in other clothes for other work, as people do
who witness engines burst open in the dark.

 

Clare blogs at selfportraitwithoutbreasts.wordpress.com

See more here.

And come and hear more at the Fruitmarket Gallery!

 

6 Poets at the Fruitmarket Gallery – 7pm, Wed 17 August 2016 - Rob A. Mackenzie

Poet #2 – ROB A. MACKENZIE

Join Rob A. Mackenzie, Clare Best, Isobel Dixon, Alan Gillis, Eliza Kentridge, and Tessa Berring at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, on Wednesday 17 August, 7pm for a prompt 7:30 reading start, to finish at 9:30 – 3 poets in each half, with a short interval for wine and book buying. The evening is free, but donations are welcome. Sign up on Eventbrite or Facebook.

The Fruitmarket Gallery is right by Waverley Station: 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1DF - View Map

The poets will read new work and from recent collections, and the night will include some original poems from the poets inspired by the work of Damián Ortega in the gallery’s current exhibition. Damián Ortega is one of the most prominent artists of the new Mexican generation and for The Fruitmarket Gallery’s summer exhibition, Ortega has made new sculptures, mostly from clay, focusing on how the forces of nature – wind, water, earth and fire – act on the earth both independently of and in relationship to humans.

Here’s an introduction to another of our six poets:

About Rob:

Rob A. Mackenzie is from Glasgow and lives in Leith. He has published two pamphlets and two full collections, the most recent of which was The Good News (Salt, 2013). He is reviews editor of Magma.

Wedding

No flowers, as if my bride were saving
herself for a funeral to come. She carried
plastic posies acquired at a local garage,
a last-second panic, and walked the aisle
like a plank, with drunk, flat-footed certainty.
Pepsi or Coke? An exchange of mystery
ring-pulls took place, bridesmaids skin tight
and self-conscious, congregation mouthing
Groovy Kind of Love to a jumping CD.

No photographs. No video. Corned beef
sandwiches proved themselves reliably
irresistible at the reception. No kissing.
No presents, we had insisted, but guests
brought avocado kitchen clocks all the same,
batteries winding down, as if everyone knew
the honeymoon suite was twin-bedded with
panoramic views of short-term disturbances.

                            ‘Wedding’ was first published in New Walk magazine.

 

See more here.  

And come and hear more at the Fruitmarket Gallery!

6 Poets at the Fruitmarket Gallery – 7pm, Wed 17 August 2016 - Eliza Kentridge

Poet #1 - ELIZA KENTRIDGE

Join Eliza Kentridge, Tessa Berring, Clare Best, Isobel Dixon, Alan Gillis, and Rob A. Mackenzie at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, on Wednesday 17 August, 7pm for a prompt 7:30 reading start, to finish at 9:30 – 3 poets in each half, with a short interval for wine and book buying. The evening is free, but donations are welcome. Sign up on Eventbrite or Facebook.

 The Fruitmarket Gallery is right by Waverley Station: 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1DF - View Map

 The poets will read new work and from recent collections, and the night will include some original poems from the poets inspired by the work of Damián Ortega in the gallery’s current exhibition. Damián Ortega is one of the most prominent artists of the new Mexican generation and for The Fruitmarket Gallery’s summer exhibition, Ortega has made new sculptures, mostly from clay, focusing on how the forces of nature – wind, water, earth and fire – act on the earth both independently of and in relationship to humankind.

 Here’s an introduction to the first of our six poets:

About Eliza:

 Eliza Kentridge was born in 1962 in Johannesburg.  She came to England in 1988, and has lived in a riverside village in Essex since 1990.  She is a visual artist.  Her first book of poems, Signs For An Exhibition, (Modjaji Books) appeared in 2015.

 SIGN POEM 56

When I was six, I had a doll
I loved her so much
I believed she was alive
I believed she left a warm patch on the bed

CELESTE

When I was thirty, I had a baby

YOU LOVE HIM MORE THAN ANY DOLL

Sage grandmother, you were right
I did and still do
Same with the girls
Celestial cellmates
Squidgy arms threaded through Raggedy Anne sleeves
Flesh of my flesh
Wet, warm patches on my heart

 

See more about Eliza’s work on her website here.

And come and hear more at the Fruitmarket Gallery!

THE LEONIDS - Flowers, Meteor Showers ...

In the same way my first instinct is to close my eyes and not open the attachment when poetry proof pdfs arrive in my inbox, when The Real Books arrive, I have a kind of stage fright/envelope-opening phobia. To be fair, once I did open a box of handsome hardbacks to find there was an almighty clanger of an error on the dedication page (which was actually all my fault, but that’s another story…).

So when the envelope arrived yesterday, with the very superior ‘Cat’s Whiskers’ Mariscat cat logo on the back, I hesitated – what if the last typo we caught, wasn’t the last typo after all? What if I have writer’s remorse (too late, the die is cast, the printer’s ink has dried…). But the enigmatic cat did not disappoint – and my publisher Hamish Whyte and designer and typesetter Gerry Cambridge have done a beautiful job of The Leonids. I hope others agree. I sat on the sofa yesterday stroking the lovely creamy end papers and looking at the spacious pages as though they were someone else’s words given space to breathe. I love the way words can fly through the ether and reach people all over the world in our connected age, but there’s still nothing like the beauty of A Real Book (even if this is a short one, officially a pamphlet or chapbook, without a spine, but slim and light and bright and mine). The Leonids has vivid nasturtium orange covers, the colour of the flowers my mother grew outside the kitchen at Number 42 (a house that looms larger in the book than I realised till I did actually read those proofs…), and the exact same shade as my mother’s orange dress which features in the first poem ‘Notes Towards Nasturtiums’. And there are nasturtiums trailing down the Hermanus cliff path in ‘Roman Rock’ at the end. As you may guess, I’m rather fond of them.

We have no nasturtiums in our garden here in Cambridge (I tried once, but the aphids had a ball, and I’m better at flowers on the page than in the soil, or at least I hope so…), but I realised a favourite photo of my father and mother, around whom these poems turn, has similar shades in it: the warm red and saffron of cardigan and winter sheets, as they wake from a Sunday nap, some chilly Karoo afternoon way back when. So here they are, Ann and Harwood, with my little bright book – though not quite in the same realm any more. I like to think they would be pleased: my mother had heard or read several of the poems before she died last year and seemed not to mind – indeed perhaps she wanted – people reading poems about some dark times in her life.  The Leonids has sad subjects in it, but I hope people see the light in it too. At heart it is a celebration of the beautiful complexity of family, and I hope it does them honour. 

Thank you Hamish and Gerry, and my lovely sisters and wonderful sine qua non Jan and his family too, and the precious poets who helped me as both friends and editors. And to my mother’s family and the friends from Umtata and Graaff-Reinet who were so good to her, and the carers, official and unofficial who looked after her… So many kind people who loved Ann, Gogo, Mrs D. I thank some by name at the end of the book, but not enough, there are many more who deserve gratitude.

So I’ll be raising a glass in Scotland this Friday to Ann and Harwood (a Scotsman who would have relished an Edinburgh launch, though he wasn’t so much a man for a dram) and to friends and family far and wide. If you’re in Auld Reekie, come and join us at Blackwells, all welcome and the details are here.

LONDON'S SOLEMN SOMME COMMEMORATION

On Friday, when I was waiting for my train to go to Ledbury Poetry Festival, I saw a group of young men in World War I uniforms walk through Euston Station. A silent troop, boots clicking on the floor tiles, such solemn fresh young faces filing down into the Underground. I saw one give a young woman a card and later I learned that these had each soldier’s name, age and place of death on. A simple, heartbreaking memorial. 

I well up at every news clip about the Somme centenary, thinking of what my grandfather and all those less lucky young men faced back then. My Yorkshire grandfather was gassed on the Somme, and his one eye would always weep, his tear duct damaged by the mustard gas. But he lived to see the Second World War and died at 97. Those young men going, literally, under ground on Friday were a potent reminder of those who fought in the terrible trenches, who went over the top straight into machine gun fire - wave upon wave of them falling, so many never to get up. This quiet tribute had a profound effect - people turning, noticing, falling silent. I thought about it many times on my journey out of the city.

And yes, I choked up at the sight of those boys at Euston Station, despite knowing they were volunteer actors, not a line of ghosts, not men actually heading for the front. In this divided moment, when the British people have voted to leave a union which I believe has helped keep many nations from conflict for decades, the memories of war, and the sense of waste and sorrow is sharper than ever. 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2016/jul/01/battle-of-somme-centenary-commemorations-in-pictures#img-3

GETTING MY BEARINGS .... NEW BOOK, NEW WEBSITE ....

This weekend I found my way to Much Wenlock for the first time, for the wonderful Wenlock Poetry Festival - a first festival outing for my new collection Bearings at the Nine Arches Press Showcase and (now that I've leaped some technological hurdles) the start of a new website. I hope there are no errors in the collection, but do please bear with me while I work on this fledgling site! Some tweaking and polishing still to be done, and more on launches and festivals to follow.

I feel very fortunate indeed to have this new book out, with the help of a brilliant team of women - Jane Commane of Nine Arches Press in the UK, Colleen Higgs of Modjaji Books in South Africa, and Lynne Stuart (artist and world traveller extraordinaire), who took the haunting cover photo and did the beautiful design. You can see more of her work on her idea in a forest website.

More about the collection, from Nine Arches Press (and next month it will be out from Modjaji Books in South Africa too):

In Bearings, her fourth collection, Isobel Dixon takes readers on a journey to far-flung and sometimes dark places. From Robben Island to Hiroshima, Egypt to Edinburgh, the West Bank and beyond, these poems are forays of discovery and resistance, of arrival and loss. Bearings sings of love too, and pays homage to lost friends and poets – the voices of John Berryman, Michael Donaghy, Robert Louis Stevenson and others echo here. As Dixon explores form and subject, and a sometimes troubled past, she keeps a weather eye out for telling detail, with a sharp sense of the threat that these journeys, our wars and stories, and our very existence pose to the planet.

‘‘Isobel Dixon's recent poems confirm her sumptuous gift of mining for melody all the way down to the syllable, but it is remarkable how she can go on tightening her focus even as she widens her range of topic. With every airport lounge a new starting point, her poetry is truly an international event. Admiringly, one is forced to the conclusion that she is becoming a poet who, far from hiding in lyricism, uses it for adventure and exploration, like a magician's cloak. Her work is a perpetual transformation, inexhaustible even though anything in it can be said aloud, and indeed demands to be. There is something new under the sun on every page.’ – Clive James

‘Here is a new collection by a poet at ease with a variety of forms and approaches, and possessing the confidence to address experiment in her work. The poems often sparkle with colour, and are feisty, full of rich doubt, and complex considerations of world and self. Much energy is released into being by these poems, whether the poet is drawing on her South African roots in both contemporary and historic settings, or whether her subject is Seville, Cambridge or Dubai. A wide-ranging collection in many senses then, venturesome and powerful, remaining in the mind long after reading.’ – Penelope Shuttle

Click here to buy direct from Nine Arches Press.